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Affirmative Action Ruling Treats Higher Education as a Prize to be Won

Here are a couple of thoughts to add to the mix as legal experts and university administrators work out the meaning of today’s unsurprising ruling on affirmative action in elite college admissions. First, the framing of higher education as a competitive prize to be won, which is shared by many parties on both sides of …

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Accountability Illusions, Simpson’s Paradox and the Bottom Line

In the latest IPEDS graduation rate data (2021 graduates), Pennsylvania’s two-year (primarily associate degree) public institutions ranked 14th among the 50 states, and its four-year (primarily bachelor’s) institutions ranked 37th in the percent of students completing within 150% of the normal time. (I know and agree with many of the arguments about IPEDS grad rates, …

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The Florida Lottery and Bright Futures Reverse Robin Hood

I was recently engaged to help Orlando Sentinel reporters Leslie Postal and Anne Martin with data analysis for their extensively-researched article “How Bright Futures Favors Florida’s Wealthier Families.” If you want to explore the data in your own community, here is a set of maps and charts that let you see the distribution of lottery …

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State Postsecondary Equity Funding Measures

Collectively, the measures here are intended to reflect differences in levels of postsecondary investment from the perspective of students in different demographic groups. While no single measure is perfect, each one attempts to capture an important dimension of postsecondary funding. Most of the measures reflect differences in the types of institutions students attend. In these …

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Working Paper Estimates Impact of Cal Grant Equity Framework on Enrollments, Completions, Income and Tax Revenue

The “Cal Grant Equity Framework” (the “Equity Framework”) aims to cover more of the entire cost of attendance, including tuition and fees and other expenses such as textbooks, housing, and meals. It consolidates existing programs into two, makes benefits more predictable, and moves GPA requirements closer to alignment with the federal standard for Pell grants. …

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Distribution of Student Debt and Potential Forgiveness

Using data from the U.S. Census Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this interactive Tableau data story shows how education debt is distributed by race/ethnicity, education level, income and state, subject to the sampling and design limitations of the survey.  It also allows users to model different levels of theoretical debt forgiveness to see …

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